Autumnal Magic

Since childhood, October has always been my favorite month of the year.

All months, all seasons have their unique qualities, but October is the one for me. Of course, it all culminates with Halloween – our reinterpretation of the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people wore masks and disguises to ward off ghosts and spirits. It was though that the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was thinnest at this time, making it possible to pass through like simple diffusion through a cell membrane. Not even Pope Gregory the Third’s designation of November 1^st as All Saints Day could succeed in dispelling the underlying pagan pageantry of it.

There’s magic in change, a reason that solstices and equinoxes mean something powerful in myth and older religions. And fall in the northeastern US is particular visually stunning as the leaves let out their collective final scream in shades of red and brown and orange. In the northeastern suburbs of Philadelphia, I remember it being always the first month where it became cold enough to see your own breath. The first month when the setting of the sun became noticeably earlier. The first month for wearing gloves.

A time for conjuration. For necromancy. The autumn leaves, the bare tree branches and the raising of the dead, were forever bound together for me the first time I saw a particular painting by TSR artist Jeff Easley.

Nobody brings the undead to life like Jeff Easley.

I have good memories of October and Halloween.

On Sundays, my dad and I would watch football together, although I didn't really follow it. For me, it was all about the "Creature Double Feature" that would follow the games - old campy black and white horror films with Boris Karloff or Vincent Price or sometimes Godzilla movies (for the record, I always assumed that Creature Double Feature referred to some specific two-headed monster). My dad always pronounced Dracula with an extra "r" so it became "Dracular."

Then there was Shawn, who lived in the house on the corner of my street. He was a few years older and I thought he was the coolest. His older sister, Haley, baby sat sometimes for my sister and I, so we were young. I was maybe seven at the time. The first Halloween I remember Shawn gave me a set of glow in the dark stickers of the faces of the classic movie monsters – Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf-man. I remember staying up late that night after trick or treating to watch scary movies in what used to be my father’s old den. I watched Silver Bullet based on “Cycle of the Werewolf” by Stephen King and John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing starring Kurt Russel. It was the best kind of terror – the kind you can hide under your sheets from and make disappear. As I got older I loved horror movies – Steve and I would rent a couple almost every weekend of the school year. The original Nightmare on Elm Street series, Ghost Story, The Stuff, Return of the Living Dead, those were just a few of them. As we got older we would make more elaborate and monstrous costumes. By middle school his favorite was a cloaked skeleton costume and my preferred mask was of a fanged horror. I remember when I put it on there was the strong scent of rubber and it would become oppressively hot after just a few minutes as it filled with my own breath. When I took it off the sweat on my forehead felt good in the brisk night air.

I thought it was a lost pleasure, but New Orleans brought back a taste of it when Jen and I visited a couple years ago. Halloween was the perfect time to go – we came for the Voodoo Music Festival and stayed through the 31^st. New Orleans seems to do Halloween pretty much year round. Where the gates of Guinee are perpetually at least partly ajar while Papa Legba and his fellow loa MC the endless night party. If you believe in such things, of course.

The tomb of "Voodoo Queen" Marie Laveau

This year Jen and I joined various groups of paranormal hunters at Summerseat Mansion in Morrisville, PA. I was more interested in the history – two signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution lived there (Morris and Clymer). George Washington spent a pivotal week there, where he allegedly made the decision to attack Trenton, thereby changing the tide of the revolutionary war. Two British spies were said to have been held there briefly before their execution. If ever there was a historic home worthy of haunting, it would be this one. But I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief. The dancing lights of the various hunters' EMF devices seemed more like a nice visual effect than a message from the other side. The static on the EVP sessions seemed more likely to have come from the bonfire party going on across the street. The rattling, thumping and clanking noises, nothing more than water pipes.

Inside historic Summerseat Mansion for a paranormal investigation.

After just a couple hours Jen and I wandered outside. It was cold and dry. For me, it was refreshing – something I’ve missed living in Florida, although not as much as I thought I would. Jen felt no such nostalgia.

“Want to get out of here?” I asked.

She nodded vigorously. “Eastern State Penitentiary would have been better,” she frowned.

So, it seems, this October some portals have thus far remained closed to us. We’ll keep looking though. There may be magic and wonder and spirits yet to be uncovered, but we didn’t find any residing this autumn at Summerseat.